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Teach Yourself Photoshop September 5th, 2016 Digital Back Issue Cover

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100 Articles

Introducing the Lightroom layout

P hotoshop users now have a choice of image organisational tools. Traditionally, Photoshop has been twinned with Adobe Bridge – Bridge does the organising and Photoshop does the editing. But the introduction of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has widened the choice. At the time of writing, Lightroom is available both as a standalone program with a regular ‘perpetual’ licence (Lightroom 6)’ or as part of Adobe’s subscription-based Photography Plan. The fact is, if you are using Photoshop CC then you almost certainly have access to Lightroom CC as part of your subscription package at no extra cost, and it can prove an extremely useful tool both for managing a large collection of photographs, editing them directly or ‘pre-editing’ images, including raw files, before passing them over to Photoshop for more detailed…

Lightroom’s workflow modules

1 Library This is where you import your photos into the Lightroom catalogue, organise them into Folders and Collections, add ratings, labels, keywords and more. 2 Develop This is where you’ll find Lightroom’s editing tools. They’re the same as those in Adobe Camera Raw, but arranged in a smart new interface. 3 Map Lightroom can automatically place geotagged images on a map, and you can add location information manually to images that don’t have it. 4 Book It’s possible to design and order printed photo books entirely within Lightroom, which could prove a very useful feature for commercial photographers who want to offer their clients a range of photographic products and services. 5 Slideshow This is a great way to package up a set of photographs into a multimedia presentation…

Lightroom’s workflow modules

The Lightroom Library in detail

1 Folders Lightroom does not need to move your photos when it imports them – it can simply add them to the library in their existing location. You can see the folders they’re stored in using this Folders panel and you can also rename and move photos. 2 Collections These are ‘virtual’ collections of images, just like the ‘albums’ in other photo organising programs. When you add a photo to a collection, you’re not moving it physically, and a single photo can be in more than one collection. 3 Smart Collections Smart collections are like ‘saved searches’. You don’t add photos to a smart collection manually; instead, you set up the smart collection with properties you want to search for, such as photos with specific keywords, ratings or shooting information.…

The Lightroom Library in detail

Using Lightroom with Photoshop

Lightroom and Photoshop make a great team. You can use Lightroom to organise all your images and make basic enhancements before handing off your photos to Photoshop for more advanced work. In fact, though, as you start exploring Lightroom’s sophisticated editing tools, you might discover you don’t need Photoshop as much as you thought. You might imagine that having two sets of editing tools in two different programs would make things confusing, but it doesn’t. The thing to remember about Lightroom’s adjustments is that they are ‘non-destructive’, just like those in Adobe Camera Raw. Whatever changes you make to your photos in Lightroom you can undo at any time. And you soon get to realise that Lightroom is especially good at some jobs, like basic tone and colour corrections,…

Using Lightroom with Photoshop

Introducing the Bridge workspace

One of the biggest problems we face as digital photographers is our ever-growing collections of images. We may have thousands of photos scattered across hundreds of folders on our computers. These folders tend to display images according to when they were captured, so we have to rely on our memory of what was shot when as we search for a particular photo. All versions of Photoshop attempt to deal with this asset management problem using similar tools. The Photoshop Elements Organizer allows you to add star ratings and keywords. Lightroom’s Library module does a similar job. Photoshop CC and CS use a companion application called Bridge to help you sort the wheat from the chaff. If you access the full version of Photoshop as a download via the Creative Cloud…

Photoshop Anatomy The Bridge workspace

1 FOLDERS Click the Folders tab to browse to any folder of images stored on your PC. Drag your most commonly used folders into the Favorites panel. 2 THUMBNAILS Bridge displays your images as thumbnails. You can use the slider at the bottom of the workspace to increase the thumbnail size. 3 WORKSPACES These links enable you to change the way panels and images are displayed in Bridge. For example, the Filmstrip option gives you larger previews. 4 METADATA This panel emulates the display on your digital SLR. It reads the metadata stored in the currently active thumbnail so that you can discover what shutter speed, ISO and aperture settings where used to capture the image. It also shows the metering modes. 5 FILTERS This panel enables you to present…

Photoshop Anatomy The Bridge workspace

Overview Customising Adobe Bridge

1 FILMSTRIP By clicking the Filmstrip workspace icon you display the selected thumbnail at a much larger size in the Preview window. Shift-click to select and compare multiple images, as we’re doing in this image. 2 LOUPE VIEW The easiest way to see if an image is in focus is by looking at it at 100% magnification. To do so, click the image to activate the Loupe view. Drag the loupe to examine the image. We can see that the image on the right is blurred. 3 STACKING To stop similar-looking images from cluttering up the workspace, Shift-click to select them and then choose Stacks>Group As Stack. Click the play icon to see each thumbnail contained in a stack (or drag the scroll bar). 4 EDITED IMAGES If the colours,…

Overview Customising Adobe Bridge

Import your photos into Bridge

Bridge is an application that comes included with all versions of Photoshop. If you’re not using Lightroom to import, organise and catalogue your images then Bridge is the perfect tool that fully integrates with Photoshop. You can launch it separately or use the File > Browse in Bridge menu command in Photoshop. (There was also a Mini-Bridge panel in Photoshop, but this was discontinued in 2014.) With Bridge, you can easily browse your images and incorporate them into your workflow. However, Bridge is so much more than a browser; you can also use it to add metadata, create image collections, group photos into stacks, apply star ratings, filter images and more besides. It also offers a host of other useful features too, such as the option to select multiple images…

Import your photos into Bridge

Add metadata and keywords to your images

At the end of the workflow on the previous spread we demonstrated how to quickly add your name and the copyright status to each file as it was imported to your computer by the Photo Downloader. This useful information is stored inside each file’s metadata, so when the image is shared online or emailed to a client they will know who it belongs to. The Photo Downloader only enables you to add a limited amount of information to a batch of images, but once you’re browsing your imported images in Bridge you can add much more useful data to them, such as your contact details and website address. This helps people contact you if they need to use the image, or at least credit you as its creator. In this…

Add metadata and keywords to your images

Organise your images in Bridge

As we revealed on the previous pages, Bridge enables you to create and assign keywords to single images or batches of images so that you can find them with ease using filters. Keywords provide one of the most powerful and useful ways of helping you to locate specific photographs, although Bridge has other tools that will help you to organise your ever-growing library of images. In pre-digital days we’d place our favourite prints into photo albums. These tended to gather and present images using particular themes, such as weddings or holidays, for example. In these digital days we have many more images to manage, so we can end up scrolling through hundreds of thumbnails in search of a particular image. In this walkthrough we’ll demonstrate how to use the…

Organise your images in Bridge

Introducing the Camera Raw editor

Once you’ve organised, rated and key-worded your images in Bridge you can double click them to launch them into Photoshop to edit them. If your files have been captured in a raw format such as CR2 or NEF, they will automatically open in the Adobe Camera Raw editor. JPEG format files will open in the standard Photoshop workspace, although you can send JPEGs into Camera Raw if you prefer using that workspace’s tools. By saving a photo as a JPEG, your camera creates a compressed file that doesn’t take up much space on your memory card or your computer’s hard drive. However, much of the information about the colour and tone in the image is lost. If you want to restore missing highlight or colour detail to a JPEG, you…

Overview Camera Raw’s tool bar

1 ZOOM TOOL When sharpening a raw image you need to see the individual image pixels. Right click with the Zoom tool and choose 100% from the menu. 2 WHITE BALANCE This tool enables you to set the white balance by sampling something that should be white. If the pixels are too warm, the tool will cool the colours. 3 TARGETED ADJUSTMENT This powerful tool enables you to sample an area’s colours or tones with a click. You can then drag up to lighten the area, or down to darken it. 4 CROP TOOL This tool enables you to improve composition by removing the frame edges. The tool is non-destructive, so you can restore missing edge details at any time. The neighbouring Straighten tool enables you to counteract tilted horizons.…

Overview Camera Raw’s tool bar

Photoshop Anatomy Camera Raw editor

1 RAW FILE Our TYCC05.dng raw file has been saved as a digital negative. This native Adobe raw format means that the image will automatically open up in Photoshop’s Camera Raw editor. We can then use the suite of tools and tabs to process the image. 2 WORKFLOW (output ) OPTIONS Click this link to open the Workflow Options dialog. Here you can choose a colour space (such as the print-friendly Adobe RGB (1998)). You can also increase the Depth to 16 bits per channel to squeeze more information out of the raw file. 3 ZOOM LEVEL It’s often useful to see the image close up when working in Camera Raw, so click this pop-up menu to choose a magnification percentage. You can also click the + or - icons…

Photoshop Anatomy Camera Raw editor

Improve contrast & colour

One of the principal advantages of raw files is that they contain extra brightness and colour information you can exploit and bring out in Adobe Camera Raw. This is generally the first step in enhancing your raw files and, sometimes, the only one. This extra image detail is not always visible straight away, though, and it’s important to understand what the tone and colour controls do in Camera Raw and how they interact. This is because Camera Raw is not like a regular image editor, where you make one change and then another, and the effects are cumulative. Instead, all your adjustments are ‘live’, so that changes you make with one slider will change the effect of another. It sounds complicated, but actually it’s quite easy to grasp if…

Improve contrast & colour

Do even more with Camera Raw

On the previous pages we used a selection of toolbar-based tools and Basic panel sliders to reveal missing tonal detail, create a balanced exposure and selectively adjust colour. These types of image adjustments are some of the most common, so tools such as the Crop tool and the Basic panel are close to hand. If you dig a little deeper into Camera Raw, you’ll discover that there’s much more you can do with a raw file. To the right of the Basic panel tab are nine other tabs. These enable you to process your raw files in practical and creative ways, so that you can spend more time working with your raw format files, which is always preferable to working with images in the main Photoshop editor. Raw files…

Do even more with Camera Raw

Photoshop Anatomy Camera Raw panels

1 TONE CURVE This Parametric panel provides an additional way to lighten or darken problematic areas using the appropriately labelled sliders. The Point panel enables you to access curve-adjusting presets that change the contrast in the image with a simple click, or you can place points on a curve manually and drag them to lighten or darken specific tones, just as you would with a Curves adjustment layer. 2 DETAIL Many cameras soften an image as they process it to help avoid generating unwanted moiré patterns in the high-frequency parts of the image. By default the Detail panel applies a sharpening amount of 25 to give your pictures a bit more punch. This panel enables you to get a balance between sharpening detail while keeping image noise at bay. 3…

Photoshop Anatomy Camera Raw panels

Selectively adjust raw files

We’re all grown accustomed to using Adobe Camera Raw as an enhancement tool mainly to optimise and prepare images for more editing work in Photoshop. The relatively recent introduction of selective adjustment tools, though, has changed the balance of power in ways that many photographers may not yet fully appreciate. You may not need Photoshop as much as you think! Camera Raw now has Graduated Filter, Adjustment Brush and Radial Filter tools that can match many of the routine jobs we carry out in Photoshop, but a whole lot more quickly and also non-destructively – these localised adjustments can be changed later. Keep in mind, too, that these adjustments can make use of the full data in the raw file and not the reduced image data in converted image files.…

Selectively adjust raw files

Remove haze in Camera Raw

Those with a Creative Cloud subscription have access to Adobe’s new Dehaze feature. Found in the Camera Raw FX panel, Dehaze cuts through atmospheric haze to improve image clarity in your landscapes, transforming the effects of a dusty or humid day with limited visibility into a clear scene where you can see far into the distance. We’re using it here to improve this dramatic Nevada landscape. It’s fine as a composition, but the dusty air has made the distant mountains look flat and lifeless, and it’s also made the sky look quite dull too. The problem here – and it affects a lot of landscape shots – is that you’re not faced with an overall lack of contrast. The foreground in this shot is perfectly fine as it is, and…

Remove haze in Camera Raw

Grain and Vignette effects

Modern digital cameras can capture scenes with a degree of precision, control and accuracy that’s far ahead of the capabilities of analog film. And yet sometimes it’s the imperfections of film, and older film cameras, that we want to try to replicate. There are lots of film-effect plug-ins on the market that attempt to do that, and some pretty complex Photoshop processes for authentically ‘ageing’ a photo. In fact, though, there are two relatively simple tools in Adobe Camera Raw that can deliver something of that analog look in moments. We’re talking about the ‘Grain’ and ‘Post Crop Vignetting’ tools in the ‘fx’ tab. And while it might seem perverse to deliberately sabotage a sharp, clean digital image by making it noisier and unevenly illuminated, the effects can be…

Grain and Vignette effects

Applying lens corrections

There’s no such thing as the ‘perfect’ lens. All lenses display some degree of distortion, corner shading (vignetting) or chromatic aberration. Single focal length prime lenses suffer less because they are optically simpler, but zoom lenses are much more complex, and compromises in performance are inevitable, not least to keep the prices down to affordable levels. Typically, a standard ‘kit’ zoom lens will show some barrel distortion at its widest setting, pincushion distortion at full zoom, colour fringing around object outlines near the edge of the frame and some degree of corner shading at wider lens apertures. An unavoidable fact of life? Not any more, because Adobe Camera Raw can now identify the lens used to take a picture and apply a set of optical corrections tailored specifically to…

Applying lens corrections

Exporting photos from Camera Raw

Camera Raw is much more than just a half-way house between the raw files you shoot with your camera and being able to edit them fully in Photoshop. Besides the purely visual alterations you can make to the picture, there are some important technical settings behind the scenes which have a big impact on what you can do with your picture later. For example, you can choose the colour space for your converted images, and this can be particularly important for photos that are destined to be viewed online or printed in books and magazines. You can also choose the bit depth of the images created by Camera Raw, along with the file format. A regular 8-bit JPEG image is compact and easily transferred, but won’t survive heavy tone…

What those conversion settings mean

1 Current settings This shows the current Camera Raw conversion settings. To change them, just click the text. This opens the Workflow Options dialogue (above). 2 Presets You may decide to stick with one set of conversion settings, but if you find you need different settings for different jobs, you can create and save ‘presets’. 3 Colour space Practically all devices support the sRGB colour space so it’s ideal for sharing and online images. Adobe RGB’s wider colour space is better for printing. 4 Depth 8 Bits/Channel gives perfectly good quality for images that aren’t going to undergo much more manipulation, and it’s the only choice for JPEG images. But 16 Bits/Channel produces images with smoother tonal transitions that don’t break up so badly when heavily edited. 5 Image sizing…

What those conversion settings mean

Batch processing with Camera Raw

1 Filmstrip Start by selecting all the raw files you want to convert in Adobe Bridge, then right-click them and choose Open in Camera Raw from the menu. Camera Raw will now display a vertical filmstrip down the left side of the window showing all the open files. 2 Selected image You can edit all the images in the filmstrip individually before carrying out the conversion process, or edit one and ‘synchronise’ your settings across the rest. This is especially useful if you’re carrying out white balance changes, say. 3 Filmstrip menu This has option for selecting all the images in the filmstrip and synchronising adjustments across the whole batch, based on the settings applied to the currently selected image. In Camera Raw 9.5.1, seen here, this menu also enables…

Batch processing with Camera Raw

Introducing the Photoshop workspace

Since its debut in 1990, Photoshop has grown and developed to maintain its role as the world’s most popular image-editing application. Indeed, the name Photoshop has become synonymous with the act of digitally processing a photograph. Although this book focuses on Photoshop CC and CS, we’ll start by placing this most expensive and powerful version in context with the other versions of the Photoshop application so you can understand its strengths. Adobe has now created a whole slew of free mobile image editing apps for smartphones and tablets, including Photoshop Express, Photoshop Fix and Photoshop Mix. These are designed for quick image manipulation while you’re on the move. Next up is Photoshop Elements for regular desktop and laptop computers. This is a cut-down version of Photoshop that’s designed to help…

Introducing the Photoshop workspace

Photoshop Anatomy The workspace

1 LAYERS PANEL By editing in layers you can seamlessly combine different elements together, such as the studio-based model and the exterior street scene in this image. You can also make non-destructive changes to the colours and tones of an image using adjustment layers, as we’ll demonstrate in chapter 3. 2 LAYER MASKS Layer masks are one of the most powerful tools in Photoshop when it comes to making composites. The black section of the mask makes the corresponding pixels on the attached layer transparent. White pixels create solid areas. You can fine-tune the affect of a mask using a black or white brush. 3 TOOLS PANEL Here you’ll find a host of tools designed to enable you to edit or enhance your images. Selection tools such as the Magic…

Photoshop Anatomy The workspace

Introducing the Tools panel

A traditional darkroom photographer had a suite of tools to call upon when processing images, such as bits of card that enabled selective lightening (dodging) or darkening (burning) of parts of a picture. Other tools included an enlarger that equipped the photographer to produce prints of specific sizes. Photoshop has a vast suite of equivalent darkroom tools to help us process a picture, or to crop them to improve composition, for example. In the darkroom a photographer might use a brush to paint over unwanted objects. We can mimic this challenging retouching task more easily in Photoshop’s digital darkroom, thanks to features such as the Clone Stamp tool. Photoshop has a wide range of imageediting tools packed into panels and buried in menus and sub-menus. The most useful tools are…

At a glance Tools of the trade

1 EXPAND AND FLOAT Click this little icon to toggle between a long, single column of tools, or a shorter panel containing two columns. You can also undock the panel. 2 COMPARTMENTS The Tools panel has 20 compartments. To keep the panel at a manageable size, many related tools share a compartment. 3 TOGGLE the TOOLS The Tools panel contains 66 tools. Click and hold down the mouse on a compartment to reveal its contents, then click the tool you require. 4 ZOOM TOOL The side-by-side Zoom and Hand tools work in conjunction with each other. They enable you to zoom in and pan around your picture to examine and edit specific areas. Tap Z to summon the Zoom tool or H to switch to the Hand. Double click the…

At a glance Tools of the trade

Photoshop Anatomy The Options bar

1 TOOL PRESETS After selecting a tool you can use the Options bar to edit attributes and modify the way the tool behaves. Click the Tool Preset picker to discover other versions of the selected tool. You can save your own customised presets here too. 2 BRUSH PRESET PICKER Many tools, like the Eraser, are brush-based. The Brush Preset picker in the Options bar enables you to quickly modify the size and softness of the tool’s brush tip to change the way it alters the pixels in the image. 3 BRUSH PANEL This icon opens the Brush panel. This does a similar job to the Brush Preset picker, but you can change many more tool attributes such as the texture and its scattering properties. The Brush panel has a tab…

Photoshop Anatomy The Options bar

In this Tool School, we look at the Crop tool. This tool has a lot to offer when it comes to making shots look their best. It enables us to remove or crop the edges of a photo to create a new composition or take out unwanted objects at the edges of the frame, much as a traditional photographer would use a guillotine to trim photos after printing them. When shooting on location, we may not have enough time to think about the best way to compose a scene, especially if we’re rushing from A to B. The Crop tool enables us to reframe the photo’s subject matter at our leisure. As well as removing distracting objects, the Crop tool also allows us to correct common mistakes. For example, when…

Improve composition

Sometimes we might flick through a series of shots and only a few will stand out as being of any real worth. The odds are that the more aesthetically pleasing shots will conform to the rule of thirds. This is an artistic technique that involves separating the frame into nine equally sized boxes using a grid. By placing certain subjects in these boxes, or getting the grid’s intersecting lines to overlap specific objects in the scene, you can create a more pleasing and balanced composition. For example, you could have a hill in the bottom third of the screen, a tree in the middle third and sky at the top. The tree could also overlap intersecting horizontal and vertical grid lines at the left of the frame, as in this…

Improve composition

Use the rule of thirds overlay

1 Draw a square Open a standard portrait. Grab the Crop tool. Hold down Shift to constrain the Crop tool and draw a perfectly square crop box. The areas that will be removed will appear as a grey shield. The areas we’ll keep remain 100% visible. 2 Get some balance In the Options bar, set Crop Guide Overlay to Rule of Thirds. Drag inside the crop window to make the intersecting lines overlap the eyes. Drag outside the crop window to rotate it, correcting the model’s head tilt and creating a symmetrical portrait. 3 Creative cropping Drag the crop window right to remove half of the face. The positions of the remaining features still correspond to the rule of thirds. We have an eye, nose and mouth in the left…

Use the rule of thirds overlay

Crop to correct

As well as improving composition, the Crop tool enables you to overcome common problems. By zooming out to capture this landscape, we caught the edges of the lens hood at the edges of the frame. There’s also some vignetting at the top left. When shooting from a moving boat it’s harder to get the horizon looking horizontal, and ours tilted downwards towards the right. To remove these problems, grab the Crop tool from the Tools panel. Select the entire image to start with. Turn on the Rule of Thirds Overlay. Now hold down Shift and this will constrain the cropped shot to match the aspect ratio – the shape and proportions – of the original photo. Drag a corner handle to tighten the crop window and remove the lens hood…

Crop to correct

Resize your photos for printing

1 Choose a size Open an image that you’ve processed and is ready to print. Click the Crop tool icon. Move up to the left of the Options bar and then click the Tool Preset picker’s triangular fly-out icon. Select the Crop 5 inch x 7 inch 300 ppi preset. 2 Change the orientation By default, the preset will create a portrait-oriented crop, but this particular image is in landscape format. Click the Swaps Height and Width icon in the Options bar to correct this. Click and drag to crop the image. 3 Check the size To complete the crop, hit Enter or click the tick icon on the Options bar. Go to Image>Image Size. Set the units to inches. You’ll see that the shot is precisely 7 inches wide…

Resize your photos for printing

Photoshop Anatomy Crop tool options

1 TOOL PRESET PICKER You can use these presets to make the Crop tool resize the cropped image to fit specific dimensions and resolutions. 2 QUICK SWAP Click this icon to swap a preset’s width and height so that you can perform portrait or landscape-oriented crops. 3 OVERLAY Click here to add a composition-friendly rule of thirds grid to the Crop box, or a more conventional grid. 4 OPACITY AND COLOR Reduce the opacity setting to make the contents of the shielded areas more visible. You can change the colour of the shield, too. 5 PERSPECTIVE When cropping photos of architecture, you can use this option to manually straighten converging verticals at the same time. 6 TOOL COMPARTMENT The Crop tool hangs out in the Tools panel with the less…

Photoshop Anatomy Crop tool options

Image and canvas size explained

W hen you’re preparing your photos for printing it’s easy to get caught up in the confusing array of options for width and height, percentages, pixel dimensions, resolution and resampling. It’s just as difficult when you need to resize photos for use online. The key concept to keep in mind at all times, though, is ‘resizing’ versus ‘resampling’. Resizing is a non-destructive process that simply changes the size at which the pixels will be reproduced. It’s completely reversible and doesn’t actually change the image itself. This is what you use to create different-sized prints from within Photoshop. But when you’re creating images for online use you need to work directly in pixels. You can’t display a 6,000 x 4,000 pixel photo on a web page only 1,024 pixels across! This…

Canvas Size settings and what they mean

1 Current size This section shows you your photo’s current size, and the units of measurement are the same as those you choose in the New Size section. 2 Width and height If you increase the canvas size you create empty (background) space around the photo. If you reduce it, you crop off the edges of the picture. 3 Size units You can set the new canvas size in percentage values, pixels, inches and other units – pixels and percentages tend to be the most useful. 4 Relative sizes If you leave this unchecked, the values you type into the Width and Height boxes will set the absolute canvas size. If you check this box, you type in the amounts you want to add to the current size, which is…

Canvas Size settings and what they mean

How to use the Image Size dialogue

1 Image size (MB) This is for information only. It tells you the image file size in its uncompressed form, but JPEGs, TIFFs and Photoshop files use compression to reduce the file size. It’s useful for checking how much difference resizing the image will make, though. 2 Dimensions If you leave the Resample box unchecked, this too is for information only. It will display the current image size according to the units of measurement you choose for the Width and Height settings in the section below. 3 Fit to menu This offers preset image sizes for different purposes including on-screen display (the top section), regular office paper sizes (the next section) and common photo print sizes (the section below). These presets will automatically check the Resample box because they need…

How to use the Image Size dialogue

The power of adjustment layers

Once, every adjustment you made to your images in Photoshop was applied directly to the pixels in your photo. There was no going back, at least not without duplicating layers, using the History panel, or reverting to a backup. But the introduction of adjustment layers changed all that. Adjustment layers merely change the appearance of the layer(s) below without modifying any of the pixels. You can change an adjustment layer’s settings long after you’ve created it and you can stack adjustment layers to produce cumulative editing effects. If you save your images in the Photoshop (.psd) format, the adjustment layers are saved with them and remain fully editable. The only time their effect is made permanent is when you save a copy of your image in another file format. Adjustment…

The power of adjustment layers

Basic fixes with a levels layer

Levels adjustments don’t look terribly sophisticated when you compare them with what you can do with a curves adjustment layer, but they are a really quick and easy way to optimise your image ahead of any more detailed work. Often, it’s only when you’ve got the levels right that you can properly see what to do next. The key to this is the histogram display in the levels panel. From this you can tell whether your image has a full range of tones. If not, you can drag the black point and white point sliders underneath to line up the left and right edges of the histogram. Our walkthrough, opposite, shows how this works on a real-life image and some of the hidden depth of levels! By default, levels adjustments…

Basic fixes with a levels layer

Master Curves in Photoshop

1 Add punch Add a Curves Adjustment layer, then drag the top part of the curve upwards to lighten the image. Click the bottom of the curve to add a second anchor point, then drag this point downwards to darken shadows. 2 Tweak the colours Add a Curves layer, then choose Blue from the dropdown menu. Drag the bottom-left point upwards to add blue to the shadows, and the top-right point down to add yellow to the highlights.…

Master Curves in Photoshop

Photoshop Anatomy The Curves controls

Tone Curve Camera Raw has its own version of the Curves command: called the Tone Curve, it works in much the same way. Raw files are usually a little flat, so will often benefit from increased punch. 1 Neutral grey eyedropper Grab the neutral grey eyedropper and click a point in an image you know should be grey; then all the other colours will remap around this new grey point. 2 The curve line The diagonal line can be dragged up or down to lighten or darken the image. Each point you click creates an anchor. It’s important where you place a point, because this determines which part of the tonal range you wish to change. Towards the left will target shadow tones, and the right will change highlights. 3…

Photoshop Anatomy The Curves controls

Selective Hue/Saturation tweaks

Colour adjustments are central to much of the photo enhancement work we do in Photoshop, and much of the time we simply want more! One way of doing this is with a Vibrance adjustment layer – which actually has two sliders, one for Vibrance and one for Saturation. The saturation slider is a pretty crude tool which increases all colours equally, while Vibrance is more sophisticated and strengthens weaker colours more. But neither offers any control over individual colours, and for this you need a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Now at first sight this doesn’t appear to be very helpful because it simply offers global hue, saturation and lightness sliders – and the saturation slider appears to offer no particular advantage over the version in the Vibrance panel. However, the Hue/Saturation…

Selective Hue/Saturation tweaks

Convert colour photos to mono

Black and white photography shows no signs of dying away. In fact, it’s become a mainstream creative choice for photographers attempting to capture the world in a dramatic or timeless way. But creating a successful black and white image isn’t as simple as just removing the colour information, because the way different colours translate into different shades of grey makes a massive difference to the finished picture. In the days of film you would control this using differentcoloured ‘contrast’ filters on the lens. These days, you can do it using a Black & White adjustment layer in Photoshop. With this, you can control the relative strengths and hence brightness values of the colours in the photo as they are translated into shades of grey. In the old days, this would…

Convert colour photos to mono

Adjustment layer masks in action

Layer masks are a powerful tool because they enable you to modify selections made by Photoshop’s selection tools until they are perfect. By painting white or black strokes on a mask you can show or hide pixels on the image layer the mask is attached to. This enables you to hide an unwanted sky, for example, and show through a more interesting one on another layer underneath. But layer masks are also invaluable when it comes to common image adjustments – in fact, every adjustment layer you create comes with a ready to use layer mask. In the case of our starting image here we need to darken the over-exposed sky with a Levels adjustment layer to reveal missing detail and colour. However, this will plunge the correctly exposed foreground…

Adjustment layer masks in action

Introducing the Layers panel

When Photoshop appeared back in 1990, it lacked the ability to edit using layers. You could select and copy pixels from one image and paste them into another to create a montage. However, once you’d pasted an object, you couldn’t reposition it later on. The composite image was flat. It wasn’t until the release of Photoshop 3.0 in 1994 that the Layers panel appeared. This revolutionised the way image editors could work. By pasting copied pixels onto a separate layer, you could reposition the layer’s content at any time, and fine-tune the layout of your design with ease. You could also edit the colours and tones on individual layers, which provided more freedom and control. Layers behave like a stack of transparent sheets. You can add content to each of…

Introducing the Layers panel

Photoshop Anatomy The Layers panel

1 FLOATING PANEL Like our levitating island, the Layers panel can float anywhere in the workspace so that it’s closer to hand. Just click its tab and drag it out of the panel dock. You can drag it back to the dock later. 2 LOCKED LAYER When you first open a photograph you’ll see a single locked Background layer. You can double click the layer’s thumbnail to unlock it, or select and copy its content onto a separate layer, as we’ve done here. 3 LAYER TRANSPARENCY Each layer thumbnail provides a preview of the contents of the associated layer. Here we’ve copied a mountain and pasted it into this layer. The transparent sections of the layer are indicated by a pattern. 4 OPACITY Once you’ve clicked a thumbnail to target…

Photoshop Anatomy The Layers panel

Transform tools

This lesson we look at a set of Photoshop tools that are designed to help you perform a wide range of everyday edits. All the Transform tools work in a similar way – they enable you to reposition some or all of the pixels that make up your image to produce a variety of results. The Transform tools are Photoshop’s basic infantry. Each member of the Transform platoon moves a picture’s pixels around, but in a variety of ways. Stationed in the Edit>Transform menu, different Transform commands can be deployed depending on the task in hand. If you’re compositing elements from one shot with another then you can use Transform>Scale to shrink a layer’s components to fit the new background. You can change the angle of a layer’s component using…

Transform tools

Take to the skies!

By transforming your source files, you can alter the appearance of reality in really creative ways. By shooting the same two planes a few times, we were able to add them to separate layers and transform their scale, position and angle of rotation to create two warring factions engaged in a fight to the death. We’ll show you how to apply various Transform commands in our stepby-step walkthrough below. However, before you start to transform a plane you’ll need to isolate it from its original background. Open an aeroplane photo and double click the Background layer’s thumbnail. Grab the Magic Wand tool and set it to a Tolerance of 35. Tick Contiguous. Shift-click to select all bits of sky including those between the wings. Choose Select>Inverse. Click the Add layer…

Take to the skies!

Transform the layer content

1 Move transform Once you’ve isolated your subject, choose Select>All and then Edit>Copy. Open an aerial background and then Edit>Paste the copied plane into it. Use the Move tool to drag it left and down. Add another aeroplane to the document. 2 Rotate transform Use the Move tool to move it into position. Tick the Show Transform Controls option. Place the cursor outside the bounding box to activate the Rotate Transform tool. The cursor will change. Drag to rotate the plane –27 degrees. Hit Enter. 3 Scale transform Click the corner handle to scale the plane. Hold down Shift to constrain the proportions and drag the corner handle to scale the plane by about 62%. Add and transform more aeroplanes using the same techniques.…

Transform the layer content

Perspective transformations

Most buildings have vertical walls that extend at a 90-degree angle from the ground. However, in some architectural photos the walls appear wider apart at the ground, but tilt inwards towards the top. These converging vertical lines are created by perspectival distortion. As you get closer to a building, you need to tilt your camera to get the top of the structure in shot. This increases perspectival distortion. To avoid these converging vertical lines you could try shooting your subject from a more distant vantage point, so you no longer need to tilt the camera upwards. This will help the subject’s walls to run parallel with the edges of the frame. Fortunately, Photoshop’s Perspective Transform command enables you to counteract perspectival distortion. However, by distorting the shot you can end…

Perspective transformations

Vertical verticals

1 Extend the canvas Open a photo of a building. Before we straighten the converging verticals, we’ll need to make some space at the top of the frame. Go to Image>Canvas Size and increase the size of the canvas. Set the Canvas Extension Color to White. Click OK. 2 Correct perspective Double click the Background layer. Choose Edit>Transform>Perspective. Drag the top left control handle left to straighten the top of the building. Drag the bottom left control handle right until the walls run parallel to the frame edge. 3 Crop and rotate Crop the transparent areas at the bottom of the corrected image. Drag outside the box to rotate and straighten the wonky horizontal lines. Hit Enter. Finally, use Edit>Transform>Distort to fine-tune the edges of the frame.…

Vertical verticals

Photoshop Anatomy Transform command

1 SCALE Choose Edit>Transform>Scale and then drag a corner handle to shrink or enlarge a layer’s content. 2 ROTATE Choose Edit>Transform>Rotate. Drag outside the bounding box to rotate a layer’s (or selection’s) content. 3 SKEW Choose Edit>Transform>Skew to activate this option. You can then skew the shape left or right. 4 DISTORT Choose Select>Transform>Distort and then drag any of the box’s control handles to move them independently. 5 PERSPECTIVE Choose Select>Transform>Perspective. Drag a corner handle and the opposite handle will move by the same value. 6 WARP Choose Edit>Transform>Warp. Drag the handles to curve the shape and produce organic-looking transformations. 7 ROTATE There are three fixed value Rotate options. Here we’ve rotated the shape 90 degrees clockwise. 8 FLIP The Edit>Transform>Flip command enables you to flip the shape horizontally or…

Photoshop Anatomy Transform command

Be creative with blending modes

The blending mode drop-down menu that sits near the top-left corner of the Layers panel is a powerful addition to the Photoshop user’s toolbox. By changing the blending mode of a layer, you can alter the way that it interacts with the layers beneath it. This enables you to blend layers for creative effect, such as using an abstract texture to age an image. The image above was tinted and aged using a Hard Light blending mode to mix the colours and tones of a rusty metallic texture with a butterfly collage. We also used the Lighten blending mode to add a hint of fog to the canal background. As the following guide shows, there are 27 blending modes in total. We’ve applied each one to the same butterfly layer…

Be creative with blending modes

Organise your layers efficiently

When working on creative projects, you can build up a large collection of layers. This can lead to time wasted scrolling through multiple layers in search of specific content, especially if the layers have generic names such as Layer 1, layer 2 and so on. In this tutorial we’ll offer you some housekeeping suggestions on how to organise your layers more effectively. We’ll also demonstrate how to find layers according to attributes such as their names or assigned colour labels. Any adjustment layer you add to the Layers panel will alter the colours and tones on all of the layers below it. You may not want to adjust every layer, though, so we’ll show you how to restrict an adjustment layer to the layer directly below it, while preserving the…

Organise your layers efficiently

Add effects with Layer Styles

Photoshop’s Layer Styles enable you to enhance your images with a huge range of creative effects that are fun and easy to use. In this tutorial we’ll chisel some text into the stony surface of our starting image courtesy of the Type tool, Blend modes and Layer Styles. You can adapt the technique to create your own custom greetings cards or poster text. The Horizontal Type tool produces filled vector shapes that you can edit to change the font and characters, just as you would with a word-processing package. This gives you the freedom to tweak your text at any time, even after you’ve used Layer Styles to make it look like it’s carved in stone. We’ve used the Emboss Layer Style to give the flat 2D text the illusion…

Add effects with Layer Styles

The selection tools

I n this Tool School lesson, we take a look at the many applications of the Quick Selection and Magic Wand tools. From replacing dull backgrounds to making faster selective adjustments, these nifty Photoshop devices will help you enhance your images and speed up your selection workflow. The Quick Selection and the Magic Wand tools select pixels based on colour and tonal similarity, so they share the same Toolbox compartment. However, like any double act they have their own individual strengths. To start making a selection with the Magic Wand tool, you simply click an area to sample it. The tool will then select similar pixels based on the colours and tones that you first clicked. By brushing the more intelligent Quick Selection tool over your subject, it will create…

The selection tools

Unleash the power of the Magic Wand tool

Some shots – like our Bonsai tree here – have coloured backgrounds that you may want to select and replace. When set up correctly, the Magic Wand tool can tackle these sorts of selection challenges in just a few clicks. As well as the New Selection option that gives you a basic marquee, there’s also Add to Selection and Subtract from Selection. When zoomed in to your image, these incredibly useful tools will fine-tune your marquee, particularly around edges and in detailed areas. Although small and seemingly insignificant, the Sample All Layers tick box shouldn’t be overlooked. This facility ensures that your selection includes similar pixels on multiple layers, and not just the one currently targeted in the Layers panel. If there are any patches of unwanted background sky hiding…

Unleash the power of the Magic Wand tool

Get rid of unwanted backgrounds

1 Create a selection Open a portrait shot against a clean background. Use the Quick Selection tool to paint over the background. Tick Subtract from Selection and paint over the hairs. This creates a rough selection that also includes background pixels. 2 The Refine Edge tool Hit Select>Inverse. Click Refine Edge and set View Mode to On Layers. To restore hairs and hide background pixels, tick Smart Radius. Slide it to 7.5. Tick the Refine Radius tool icon. Set Size to 60. Paint over edge hairs. 3 Fine-tune the selection Set Contrast to 39. For a smoother selection, set Smooth to 10 and Feather to 1.4. Tick the Decontaminate Colors box and set Amount to 64%. Set Output to New Layer with Layer Mask and click OK.…

Get rid of unwanted backgrounds

More advanced selections

The intelligent Quick Selection tool can work out what subject you’re trying to select as you paint over it. If it does get confused, you can call on the help of the Add To and Subtract From icons in the Options bar to fine-tune the selection. Clever though it is, the Quick Selection tool can sometimes find it difficult to locate the edges of your subject. This is especially true if there’s minimal contrast between the subject and the background, or if there’s any softness to your subject caused by a shallow depth of field. It will also find it a challenge to include delicate edge details like hair and eyelashes – even if they are overlapping a uniformly plain white studio backdrop! For this portrait shot, we ran the…

More advanced selections

Including fine details in a selection

1 Create a selection Open a portrait shot against a clean background. Use the Quick Selection tool to paint over the background. Tick Subtract from Selection and paint over the hairs. This creates a rough selection that also includes background pixels. 2 The Refine Edge tool Hit Select>Inverse. Click Refine Edge and set View Mode to On Layers. To restore hairs and hide background pixels, tick Smart Radius. Slide it to 7.5. Tick the Refine Radius tool icon. Set Size to 60. Paint over edge hairs. 3 Fine-tune the selection Set Contrast to 39. For a smoother selection, set Smooth to 10 and Feather to 1.4. Tick the Decontaminate Colors box and set Amount to 64%. Set Output to New Layer with Layer Mask and click OK.…

Including fine details in a selection

Photoshop Anatomy Quick Selection

1 NEW SELECTION Creates a selection marquee independent of any previous selections you may have made. With this highlighted, you can begin brushing over your subject. 2 ADD TO SELECTION Once you’ve created your initial selection, the Quick Selection tool will automatically change over to this option that allows you to add further areas. 3 SUBTRACT FROM SELECTION Enables you to remove unwanted areas from your selection. Select it directly from the Options bar, or hold down Alt to activate it. 4 BRUSH PICKER Gives you access to options such as Diameter, Hardness, Spacing and Shaping that will customise the brush tip of the Quick Selection tool. 5 Tool Preset Picker The Quick Selection tool has no presets, but you can save your own for use on other images at…

Photoshop Anatomy Quick Selection

The Eraser tools

When faced with the challenge of selecting and replacing an unwanted background we’re spoilt for choice thanks to Photoshop’s comprehensive collection of tools. If you gave three Photoshop users the task of removing the clutter in our opening image’s background you might see three different approaches. To remove the sky, Photoshop user number one might reach for the Magic Wand to sample the sky pixels and then Shift-click to add other background details to the selection, and use Edit>Cut to remove the selected pixels. Due to the complexity and variety of some of the background details, Photoshop user number two might decide to select the parrot instead of the background, using the Quick Selection tool. A few swipes of this brush-based tool would select most of the parrot, although some…

The Eraser tools

Erase unwanted backgrounds

When you use any Photoshop tool to create an initial selection marquee it’s unlikely to be a perfect selection. You may need to convert it into a layer mask (by choosing Layer> Layer Mask>Hide Selection) and then apply a black brush to the mask to remove any remaining bits. Alternatively, you’d need to apply white strokes to the mask to restore details. Layer masks are nondestructive, so those hidden details are still available. You may fear using the Eraser tool and its cousins – the Magic Eraser and the Background Eraser – because they don’t create selection marquees that can be fine-tuned with masks, but instead permanently delete pixels. By getting the three Eraser tool variants to work as a team, we can remove our unwanted background without worrying about…

Erase unwanted backgrounds

How to cut out with the Eraser tools

1 First strike Grab the Magic Eraser. Set Tolerance to 34 and tick Contiguous. Click to delete the blue sky. Reduce Tolerance to 24 and click to delete the cream and yellow background while preserving the similarly coloured white feathers. 2 Erase the edges Grab the Background Eraser. In the Brush Preset picker, choose a soft tip with a Size of 125. Tick Sampling: Once. Set Limits to Find Edges. Erase pixels adjacent to the white feathers. To erase less fine edges, set Limits to Discontiguous. 3 Get more control Grab the Eraser tool. Remove any pixels that aren’t adjacent to the bird’s fine edges. To erase background pixels near the perch, hold down Shift and click to place a point. Click the cursor on another point and you’ll erase…

How to cut out with the Eraser tools

Background and Magic Erasers

Each Eraser tool has its own strengths and weaknesses. The Eraser tool is a blunt instrument that creates pixel destruction wherever it goes, mopping up surviving pixels that have evaded the more delicate work of the other two Eraser tools. The Magic Eraser performs a more targeted strike on unwanted background details. Give it the colour and tone of a large swathe of similar pixels and these areas will be erased with a click. The Background Eraser is the most sophisticated member of the team. It combines the Magic Eraser’s ability to recognise sampled colours and tones with the standard Eraser’s editable brush-based properties, making it smart and powerful. In this section we’ll show you how to get the Magic and Background Eraser tools to perform more effectively. Each Eraser…

Background and Magic Erasers

Who’s a pretty boy, then?

1 Draw a path Grab the Pen tool. In the Options bar, set it to Path. Place anchor points around the bird. Once a rough path follows the parrot’s outline, place a few points around the sides and top of the frame. Place the last point on the first to complete the path. 2 Sample the bark Grab the Background Eraser tool. Set Size to 300. Set the sampling option to Continuous. Set Limits to Find Edges. Reduce Tolerance to 20%. Tick Protect Foreground Color. Hold down Alt and click to sample some of the bark. 3 Erase the path Click the Direct Selection tool. Right click the image and choose Stroke Path. Set the Tool to Background Eraser. Click OK. This Eraser will erase the background pixels. Remove any…

Who’s a pretty boy, then?

Photoshop Anatomy The Eraser tools

1 BRUSH PRESET PICKER Click here to modify the hardness and size of the Eraser and Background Eraser tools. The Eraser tool also supports the new Bristle Brush presets. 2 MODE When using the Eraser tool you can use this drop-down menu to change the Eraser type; from a soft brush to a sharp pencil to a square block. 3 FLOW A lower percentage produces a weaker stroke, enabling you to build up your erasing in more controllable increments. 4 ERASE TO HISTO RY You can use this option to erase recent strokes with the Eraser tool. Read on below for more details on how to do this. 5 SAMPLING You can set the Background Eraser to Sampling: Once and it will erase similar pixels, or set it to Continuous…

Photoshop Anatomy The Eraser tools

Photoshop’s basic selection tools

Many of Photoshop’s tools and menu commands enable you to change the colours and tones in the entire image. However, in some cases you may need to alter the tones of a particular area without changing the image as a whole. You may also want to isolate a particular element from one photo and add it to another to create a composite image. This is where the selection tools come in handy. There are nine selection tools in the Tools panel, and in this chapter we’ll show you how to put them through their paces so that you can find the right tool for any selection challenge. The selection tools work in different ways, but they all produce a selection marquee – a straight or curved line made up of…

Photoshop’s basic selection tools

Photoshop Anatomy The marquee tools

1 COMPARTMENT Click this compartment and hold down the mouse button to access the four selection marquee variants. The Row and Column marquee tools produce instant vertical or horizontal lines that you can stroke to create guide lines, for example. 2 ADD OR SUBTRACT By default the Rectangular and Elliptical marquees produce a primitive shape selection. By clicking these options you can get the tools to add to or subtract from the initial shape that they create, to make more complex selection marquees. 3 FEATHER By default a selection marquee produces a clean, sharp edge. To create a softer edge to any selection marquee, increase the value in the Feather field. A softer edge enables copied pixels to blend more gently with their new neighbours. 4 STYLE To create a…

Photoshop Anatomy The marquee tools

How to use the Lasso tools

On the previous pages we introduced you to simple selection tools such as the Rectangular and Elliptical marquees. These primitive selection tools are fine for selecting basic shapes, but not much help if you need to select more complex or irregularly shaped objects, such as the jagged mountain in our starting image. The Lasso tools are directly beneath the marquee tools in the Tools panel. The basic Lasso tool enables you to draw a quick freehand selection marquee, which is good for making quick but rough selections. You have to make a freehand Lasso selection in one operation by clicking the mouse button, then holding it down as you draw. Once you let go of the mouse button the marquee selection is completed. Some selection challenges require a lasso tool…

How to use the Lasso tools

Intelligent selection tools

You can make quick, rough selections by manually drawing a marquee using the Elliptical or Rectangular Marquee tools. Alternatively, you can use manual selection tools such as the Polygonal Lasso tool to select more irregularly shaped subjects such as a jagged mountain. The Tools panel has a third compartment containing the intelligent selection tools. Tools such as the Magic Wand tool enable you to make selections based on similarities in colour and tone, so you can select large areas such as skies with a few clicks. This tool is handy for instantly hunting out bits of sky between tree branches. The Magic Wand tool shares its Tools panel compartment with the Quick Selection tool. Like the Magic Wand tool, the Quick Selection tool recognises changes in colour and tone, making…

Intelligent selection tools

Master the Pen tool

As we mentioned earlier in the chapter, digital images are made up of millions of tiny square pixels. These building blocks of colour and tone combine to create the illusion of reality. Pixelbased images are called bitmaps. Photoshop also enables you to produce content from scratch using tools such as the Pen tool. This tool enables you to draw graphic components for design projects (such as an icon or logo, for example). The Pen tool uses mathematics to describe the vector shapes that it produces. A vector shape consists of a series of anchor points. Between these moveable points are curves that you can bend to change the filled vector shape. The vector shape’s mathematical nature enables you enlarge a shape without any drop in quality, whereas a bitmap photo…

Master the Pen tool

Quick Mask edits

After making an initial selection with one of Photoshop’s marquee tools, you may need to tweak the shape of the marquee to select your subject more effectively. You can use the Add to or Subtract from icons in the Options bar to change the way the active selection tool behaves. Alternatively, you can adjust existing selections by using the Select menu’s Modify commands to expand or contract the selection around the edges of the subject. The Select>Modify commands are useful when fine-tuning the selection overall, such as giving it a feathered edge, but for more control you can try editing it in Quick Mask mode. A Quick Mask replaces the selection marquee with red colour. By manually painting with a black or white brush on the mask you can add…

Quick Mask edits

Many photo-fixing tasks involve making selections. You may need to select a specific part of an image, such as a bland sky, and replace it with something more interesting, or tone down an over-exposed sky without altering the correctly exposed landscape. Alternatively, you might want to cut out a model from an image, so that you can composite her into a new background image. The Tools panel contains several selection tools, from the handy but basic marquee tools to the intelligent Quick Selection tool. The selections these tools create are demarcated by a border of animated dashes. However, it’s unlikely that the edges of a selection you make will be perfect, and the Refine Edge dialogue enables you to finetune it’s shape, width, position and softness. When you make a…

Replace a background

When you’re shooting public events, you have little control over your subjects’ movements. In this image, the naturally posed soldier looks good in profile, but the partially obscured vehicle and figure in the background are distracting. We could have repositioned ourselves to cut out the background clutter, but the main subject might have moved by then. Thanks to selection tools and layers, we can isolate the soldier from the background, and improve the composition by dropping in something more interesting from another photo taken at the same event. When you select a person or object, they can look obviously ‘cut out’ because they have a hard edge, and by feathering the edge of a selection you can make a subject blend in more naturally and effectively with the new background,…

Replace a background

Create a seamless composite

1 Soften the edges After selecting the figure, click Refine Edge in the Options bar. Choose the On Black preview, so that you can see the traces of background pixels. Set Smooth to 11 and Feather to 2.5 to soften the edges, and set Shift Edge to –15%. 2 Decontaminate Tick Decontaminate Colors, and set Amount to 45%: this shifts colours of the background still clinging to the subject’s edge closer to those of the subject, so they’re less noticeable. Set Output to New Layer with Layer Mask. Click OK. 3 Add a new background Open a new background image. Go to Select>All, then Edit>Copy. Target the main document, go to Edit>Paste, and move the layer below the subject. Choose Filter>Blur>Gaussian and set an appropriate Radius to make the images…

Create a seamless composite

Challenging selections

Some subjects have a mix of edge detail, with both sharp, well-defined areas and softer, fine details. Take our studio-shot model, for example: the outline of her arm and shoulder is nice and sharp, while her flyaway hair is much more complex and fine. We can select the studio backdrop easily enough using the Magic Wand tool, but if we use Refine Edge to Feather or Expand the selection to include more hair detail, we run the risk of adding unwanted background pixels to the well-defined edges. The Radius slider in Refine Edge enables you to adjust the width of the edge over which refinements are applied, but in older versions of Photoshop you could only adjust the Radius of the entire outline. In CS5, a Smart Radius option was…

Challenging selections

Selecting complex edges

1 Make a selection Choose the Magic Wand tool, set Tolerance to 20 and clear Contiguous. Click the backdrop to select it. Next, take the Quick Selection tool and click the Subtract from selection button. Brush over the background to remove it from the selection. 2 Refine Radius Click Refine Edge, and set View to On Black. The selected hair will look sharp and jagged. Tick the Smart Radius box, and set Radius to 3 pixels. Click the Refine Radius icon. Set the brush Size to 100, and brush around the edges of the hair. 3 Clean up the colours To hide the remaining hints of backdrop, tick Decontaminate Colors and set Amount to 60%. Set Output to New Layer with Layer Mask, and click OK. You can now paste…

Selecting complex edges

Photoshop Anatomy Refine Edge options

1 SMOOTH When you select an object, its edges may include jagged or blocky clumps of background pixels. Use this slider to smooth out the edges. 2 FEATHER Increase the Feather value to soften the edges of the selection. This will help a selected subject blend more effectively with its new surroundings. 3 CONTRAST Increases the contrast between partially selected pixels, like increasing the contrast between light grey and dark grey areas of a layer mask. 4 SHIFT EDGe This slider enables you to strike a balance between revealing edge details and hiding fringes of unwanted background pixels. 5 LAYER MASK If you output your refined selection as a New Layer with Layer Mask you can continue fine-tuning it by applying white or black brushes to the mask. 6 POINT…

Photoshop Anatomy Refine Edge options

Introducing layer masks

Photoshop has plenty of tools that enable you to select parts of images based on properties such as colour or tone. In the case of our starting image, we have a basic sky that can easily be selected with a few clicks using the Magic Wand tool. After selecting the unwanted sky we could double click the background layer to unlock it and then choose Edit>Cut to remove the sky. We could then replace the original sky with something more interesting, such as a dramatic cloudscape. After cutting out the sky they will be permanently deleted from the image layer. If it turns out that you’ve also selected and deleted the edges of a building, then you won’t be able to recover those deleted details. However, by converting a selection…

Introducing layer masks

Photoshop Anatomy Layer masks in action

1 SELE CTI ON TOOL To select the sky in the starting image, grab the Magic Wand tool from the Tools panel. By holding down Shift you can click and select most of the sky’s similarlooking pixels as a ‘marching ants’ marquee. 2 HIDE SELE CTI ON After selecting most of the sky you can hide the unwanted pixels by choosing Layer>Layer Mask> Hide Selection. This attaches a black-and-white layer mask to the original Background image layer that hides the selection. 3 TRANS PAREN CY Once you turn a selection into a layer mask, the masked (or hidden) pixels are replaced by a chequerboard transparency pattern. You can then drop another image layer into the background to replace the sky in these transparent areas. 4 LAYER MASK After converting a…

Photoshop Anatomy Layer masks in action

Make better layer masks

Photoshop CC has a new ‘Select and Mask’ option which enables you to refine and improve existing layers masks with rough or pixelated edges. In fact, it offers tools you might be familiar with from the Refine Mask option in previous versions. To show you how this works, we’ve created a layered image montage combining this travel shot with a new and more interesting sky on the layer below – to try this out yourself, load up the TYCC102.psd sample file. This new Select and Mask dialogue can be used to modify an existing selection, or to make a new one from scratch. In our example, we’re using the Quick Selection tool to select the blank blue sky in the top layer (it’s quicker than trying to select the more…

Make better layer masks

Make a surreal portrait

For this tutorial we set out to shoot a mid-air self-portrait inspired by an image of Salvador Dali, taken by one of the greatest portrait photographers, Phillippe Halsman. Halsman captured Dali mid-air among flying cats, canvas, chairs and a plume of water. 28 attempts were needed before the combination of flying objects looked right, with everything having to be cleared and reset after each attempt. Here, rather than doing it all at once, we’ll show you how to capture several levitating objects separately, then combine the frames in Photoshop using simple masking and selection skills. To shoot images for this effect, use a tripod and keep the focal length, focus point and exposure consistent. We used a remote trigger to fire the shutter. For lighting, we set the speedlight to…

Make a surreal portrait

Paint with filters

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to transform your photos into paintings, complete with brush strokes and watercolour borders. We’ll begin by using a neat trick with Photoshop CC’s Camera Raw filter to smooth out the detail of the original image (if you have an earlier version, open the image in Camera Raw via Bridge to apply the settings in step one). Then we’ll apply a combination of filters on several duplicates of the original layer to give our portrait a painterly look, using blending modes to combine each effect. Once done, we’ll add a layer mask and use the Wet Media brush set to create brush strokes. It’s quick, easy, and it works even if you can’t paint! Open paint_before in Photoshop. Go to the Layers panel (Window>Layers)…

Paint with filters

Apply editable filter effects

In chapter 4 we demonstrated how to adjust colours and tones by using adjustment layers. These layers sit above the original image layer, so you can fine-tune their sliders at any time. Adjustment layers enable you to edit in a non-destructive way, because the picture’s original colours and tones are always available on a separate layer. For more non-destructive editing options you can convert an image file into a Smart Object. This smart version of the file remembers its original properties, such as the colour and tone. You can then make changes using menu commands that aren’t available as adjustment layers, such as Photoshop’s huge range of filters, safe in the knowledge that the file’s original look can be recovered at any time, even after you close and then reopen…

Apply editable filter effects

Add creative effects to your photos

For the majority of this book we’ve looked at how to use Photoshop to enhance images by correcting problems with colour, exposure, and so on. In this chapter we’ll have a bit more fun by applying a host of creative effects to photos. Thanks to Photoshop’s filters you can stylise the colours and tones in an image to produce a wide range of creative looks, from pencil sketches to oil paintings. To help you find suitable creative effects, the Filter menu groups filters in folders such as Artistic and Brush Strokes. When choosing any filter, you’ll launch the Filter Gallery. This window gives you preview thumbnails of how the filtered image might look, as well as providing editable attributes that will change the results produced by the chosen filter. This…

Add creative effects to your photos

Photoshop Anatomy The Filter Gallery

1 FILTER MENU This menu command gives you access to standalone artistic filters such as Oil Paint, as well as enabling you to launch the Filter Gallery and its collection of 47 art effect filters. 2 FOLDERS You can browse different types of filter by toggling opened themed folders such as Brush Strokes. Here you’ll see thumbnails that preview the type of look produced by a particular filter. 3 FILTER LIST You can replace a currently selected filter with something new by clicking this drop-down menu. You’ll then see filters listed alphabetically, from Angled Strokes to Watercolor. 4 EDITABLE ATTRIBUTES Once you select a filter by clicking its thumbnail, any editable properties such as the Stroke Length of a brush will appear in this section. Altering these is the key…

Photoshop Anatomy The Filter Gallery

Use the Camera Raw filter tools

In earlier sections we’ve taken a good look at the handy processing tools in Camera Raw. These tools are designed to work with uncompressed raw files, but they’re so useful you often wish they were available in Photoshop itself. Well they are! The Filter menu in later versions of Photoshop has a new Camera Raw Filter option that launches the currently open image into the raw editor workspace. By editing a JPEG in Camera Raw you have a cleaner image-editing environment for routine enhancements such as Shadows, Highlights and Clarity, which can be more effective and faster than regular Photoshop adjustment layers. You can also apply sophisticated Curve, hue, saturation and lightness adjustments to modify contrast and individual colours. If you’ve spent any time at all in Adobe Camera Raw…

Use the Camera Raw filter tools

Improve images with controlled blur

W hen you capture an image on a digital SLR you can add in-camera blur effects to enhance your images. By using a wide aperture setting such as f/2 you create a shallow depth of field, for instance. This makes the focal point, such as the face in a portrait, look nice and sharp, while blurring out the distracting background elements. If you have a tilt-shift lens you can take even more control over where blur appears in your images. This specialist lens enables you to create a narrow band of focus sandwiched between two blurred sections. This narrow band of focus mimics the effect you get when shooting a small subject close up, which makes life-size scenes look like scale models. Producing good selective-focus or tilt-shift effects in camera…

Overview Create a background blur

1 IRIS BLUR Go to the Filter menu and choose Blur. The top section of the Blur menu features the Blur Gallery – Field Blur, Iris Blur and Tilt-Shift. Choose Iris Blur. 2 POSITION PIN A control pin will be placed at the centre of the image. Drag the pin to position it over the area that you want to keep sharp. 3 BLUR AMOUNT You can increase or decrease the amount of blur by dragging this dial. Areas outside the ellipse will become softer or sharper. 4 FALL OFF You can feather the area between the sharp and blurred pixels by dragging any one of these four control points. This enables you to control how gradual or steep the blend is between the focused and blurred pixels. 5 LIGHT…

Overview Create a background blur

Photoshop Anatomy Tilt-Shift blur filter

1 TILT-SHIFT If you’re already working in the Blur Gallery, click here to activate the Tilt-Shift option, and then toggle it open to access the editable properties. Or choose Filter>Blur>Tilt-Shift from the main menu bar. 2 POSITION PIN As with the Iris Blur, you can drag a pin to fine-tune the position of the sharp and blurred pixels in your filtered image. You can also drag the pin’s dial to increase or decrease the Blur amount. 3 ROTATE You can rotate a real tilt-shift lens to create a diagonal line of focus that suits your subject matter’s composition. Recreate this effect by dragging the rotate icon that appears when you rest the cursor near a control point. 4 BLUR BORDER Drag this dotted line to create a narrower or wider…

Photoshop Anatomy Tilt-Shift blur filter

How to use plug-in filters

Powerful as Photoshop is, there are some jobs it just can’t do – or which would be too difficult and time-consuming to figure out. Adobe happily acknowledges that there are specialist tools out there which can do particular jobs better or faster than Photoshop can, which is why it’s built in support for plug-ins. These are essentially mini-applications which you can invoke from within Photoshop and which return a new version of the picture to Photoshop when they’re done. There’s a booming market in plug-ins, and for this tutorial we’re using the Google Nik Collection, which has recently been made completely free and can be downloaded from www.google.com/nikcollection. If you’ve never tried plug-ins before, prepare to be amazed… The Google Nik Collection, like other plug-in software, comes with an installer…

How to use plug-in filters

Sharpen up your images

It can be a challenge to get your images looking sharp. Many digital cameras have a built-in filter that blurs the image in an attempt to avoid producing moiré patterns. This low-pass (or anti-aliasing) filter can also soften important details and create a photo that lacks impact. What looks sharp on the camera’s LCD screen may turn out to be soft. A slow shutter speed may also induce blur, which is more difficult to fix. Photoshop has sharpening tools that are designed to tease out detail in a soft-looking shot. This post-production sharpening works by increasing the contrast around the edges of details in the image, giving them more impact. However, when you sharpen an image using filters you risk exaggerating picture noise in smooth areas, such as in the…

Overview The Smart Sharpen filter

1 GET SMART You can sharpen an image in a nondestructive way by turning the image layer into a Smart Object. You can then toggle the filter on and off. 2 SMART SHARPEN Photoshop has many sharpening tools. The most versatile can be summoned by choosing Filter> Sharpen>Smart Sharpen. 3 GIVE IT 100% To assess how soft or sharp an image really is, you need to look at it at 100%. By default the Smart Sharpen preview window will zoom in to this value. 4 AMOUNT This slider increases the strength of the contrast adjustment around the edges of details in the image. This contrast boost gives fine areas, such as the eyelashes in this image, more impact and makes them look sharper. 5 RADIUS This slider increases the spread…

Overview The Smart Sharpen filter

Photoshop Anatomy Shake Reduction filter

1 BLUR TRACE MARQUEE Click the pin at the centre of the default blur trace marquee and drag it to the area that needs to look sharp. The Shake Reduction filter will then analyse the selected area to determine the length and direction of motion-blurred pixels. 2 BLUR TRACE BOUNDS After launching the filter, Photoshop attempts to work out how long and wide the steaks of motion blur are in pixels. If you spot haloes around contrasting edges, try reducing the amount. 3 SOURCE NOISE If your photo was captured using a high ISO such as 800 or higher, then you can set this drop-down menu to High to stop noise artefacts from being exaggerated by the shakereduction process. 4 ARTEFACT SUPPRESSION The shake-reduction process can add ugly artefacts such…

Photoshop Anatomy Shake Reduction filter

Remove noise from your photos

When shooting with a traditional film camera, you could use film with different ISO speeds to capture more detail in low-light conditions. The faster (higher) the film’s ISO speed, the more sensitive it was to available light. A fast film enabled you to avoid using slow shutter speeds in low light, so you could capture detail without the need for a tripod. You could also shoot handheld in locations where a flash was prohibited, such as in a museum or church. However, fast ISO speed film added clumps of grain to your negatives. The higher the ISO speed, the grainier the images would be. Digital cameras recreate the traditional ISO film speed effect to enable you to capture more detail in low light. As with film, higher ISO settings (such…

Remove noise from your photos

Lens correction

W hen you shoot with a wide-angle lens you may notice that the scene’s horizontal and vertical lines appear curved. This is referred to as geometric distortion. The amount of lens-induced geometric distortion varies from lens to lens (and it also depends on the focal length you’ve used to capture the scene), but these dramatically curved lines can detract from the authenticity of a shot. Distorted lines that bulge outwards are said to be suffering from barrel distortion, while lines that curve inwards are afflicted by pincushion distortion. Older versions of Photoshop CS enable you to tackle most types of lens distortion by using the Lens Correction filter. Geometric distortion (curved lines) can be straightened using that filter’s Remove Distortion filter. Perspectival distortion – where the lines converge inwards towards…

Lens correction

Correct perspectival distortion

I f you shoot a tall building from a low angle you risk adding perspectival distortion to the image. By tilting the camera upwards to capture the top of the building, you’ll notice that the vertical walls appear to converge inwards instead of running parallel with the edges of the frame. Photoshop’s Lens Correction filter can counteract perspectival distortion in a photo like the one on the right by letting you drag the Vertical Perspective slider to the left. This makes the top of the frame appear to lean towards the camera, straightening the converging verticals so that they run parallel with the sides of the frame. However, in this case you’ll need to lose the top of the building to get the walls looking straight, which spoils the composition…

Correct perspectival distortion

Correct converging verticals

1 Draw constraints Grab the Constraint tool. Place a point at the top left corner of the building. Place another point at the bottom left corner. A constraint line joins the two points. Draw two more vertical lines in the middle and one at the right of the building. 2 Rotate the constraints Click the left constraint line. Drag the white circle to 90°. This straightens the building’s left-hand side. Rotate the other constraint lines to make them 90°. Shift-click a vertical constraint line to set it to 90° automatically. 3 Scale transform Click to draw constraints along any warped horizontal lines. About seven lines should be enough. Shift-click each horizontal line to make it run parallel with the bottom of the frame. You may need to Shift-click vertical lines…

Correct converging verticals

Correct fisheye lens distortion

F isheye lenses like the Sigma DG 8mm f/3.5 EX enable you to capture a much wider view of a location than you could with a conventional lens. However, by using a fisheye lens your shot’s horizontal and vertical lines will be warped into curves, creating a circular shot surrounded by a black border that features parts of the lens’s interior. The old Lens Correction filter has an Auto Correction tab that enables you to use Lens Profiles to counteract some of the distortion in a fisheye photo. The Auto Correction tab’s Geometric Distortion option can straighten the curved pillars of this image’s derelict pier, but it will still struggle to iron out the bend in the horizon and the pillars will still suffer from perspectival distortion. Open a fisheye…

Correct fisheye lens distortion

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